Perfect Fifths Read online

  “Indeed.”

  “So,” Natty says. “What did she have to say for herself?”

  An apprehensive smile brings relief to his afflicted face. Marcus removes his thin wire-rimmed glasses, cautiously rubs the lenses with an untucked shirttail, then puts them back on again. He surrenders a sad laugh. Then, finally, answers.

  “Not enough.”

  eight

  “I made it!” Jessica repeats triumphantly, thrusting her boarding pass at Sylvia. “The plane is still here!”

  Sylvia barely glances at the document. “Yes, ma’am,” she says. “But we have completed the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is closed.”

  Jessica doesn’t know what’s more troubling: that the jetway door is closed? Or that she looks old enough to qualify for “ma’am” status? Either way, she has to stay on Sylvia’s good side if she has any hope of getting on the plane and staying out of the airport detention center for problem passengers.

  “But the plane is right there,” Jessica says, desperation creeping into her voice despite her best efforts to keep calm. “And I’ve got my boarding pass.”

  Sylvia is no-nonsense. When she shakes her head, her sprayed blond flip moves as a single unit; not one of the hundreds of thousands of individual hairs has the audacity to stray. “We have completed the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is closed.” Her tone is like an automated recording, unchanged from the first time she said it.

  “But I’m just one person—”

  In that moment of weakness and doubt, Jessica half swivels her head. It’s an almost unconscious impulse, too quick to register anything or anyone behind her.

  “Once the jetway door is closed, it stays closed.” Sylvia claps her hands together to illustrate her point. Her nails sparkle with the same opalescence as her lips, both painted an infantilizing pink that coordinates with her powder-blue Clear Sky uniform only in the sense that they are hues best left to gender-specific bibs and diaper bags. “It would be against TSA regulations to allow any passenger to board this aircraft,” she briskly insists, her smile tightening with every word. “We always advise our passengers to provide adequate time to—”

  “I did provide adequate time! I was held up at security by a stark-raving madwoman trying to smuggle …”

  Sylvia’s smile is frozen and synthetic, like a plastic-flavored Popsicle; she is clearly bracing herself for the tirade of passenger complaints against the incompetent Transportation Security Administration, the inconvenient Newark Liberty International Airport, the inhospitality of Clear Sky airlines, the indignities of air travel in general, none of which she can solve herself. But Jessica stops midsentence, distracted by a blurry movement in her peripheral vision. It’s the plane, of course, taxing away from the gate and toward the runway. It’s her flight, Clear Sky Flight 1884 with nonstop service to St. Thomas, the one she can’t miss. And it’s leaving without her.

  Was Marcus coming or going? she wonders again. And this time, when she turns her head, it’s deliberate. She looks long enough to confirm—he’s gone—that she’s missed her opportunity to get the answer.

  Jessica’s cell phone comes to life inside her bag, and she jumps—jumps!—as if she just discovered a venomous snake rattling around in there. She gets ahold of the vibrating device, then fumbles with the buttons for a few surprised moments before confirming that it isn’t a phone call from Pineville but a short video from the Virgin Islands.

  “Woo-hoo!” shouts Bridget, hair whipping up and airborne like patriotic yellow ribbons as she leaps in front of an impossibly blue sea. “Woo-hoo! We’re getting married tomorrow!”

  The tiny screen goes blurry as Percy turns the lens on himself. “I’m marrying a freak,” he says. “A beautiful freak.” His grin takes up the whole screen.

  The action returns to Bridget, now turning floppy cartwheels across the sand. “This is paradise! Just wait until you get here! You won’t believe it!”

  Percy swivels to catch Hope photographing Bridget with a very large and expensive-looking camera. Hope realizes she’s being filmed, goes cartoonishly cross-eyed, then shouts something that can’t be heard over the rumbling wind and the waves. Then, without an official sign-off, the screen goes blank.

  Jessica covers her face with her hands, breathes in and out. Sylvia, who has been waiting professionally if not patiently all this time, clears her throat.

  “So,” Jessica says, revealing what she hopes resembles the face of composure. “What do I do now?”

  nine

  Marcus is peeking out from behind a cylindrical floor-to-ceiling metal column roughly seventy-five yards away from Gate C-88.

  A hand yanks at his shirttail. “Let’s go.”

  Marcus shoves it away. “I’m just waiting to see what happens to her.”

  “Ten more seconds, and you’ve crossed the line between bittersweet reunion and restraining order.”

  Marcus watches Jessica’s plane pull away.

  “And I’m crouched behind you because … ?” Natty asks.

  “Because she might recognize you.”

  “I doubt it,” Natty snorts, standing up to his full height, which, in truth, isn’t that high off the ground. “She only met me that one time. Remember? Right before she rejected you. Remember that? Remember when you thought you wanted to get married at twenty-fucking-three? Remember when you proposed and she said no? Remember how our room reeked like sweaty balls because you were too depressed to pick up a bar of goddamn soap and get in the shower … ?”

  “Yeah, Natty,” Marcus says. “I remember.”

  “Good times.”

  Marcus watches as Jessica palm-heel massages her eye sockets, ignoring the Clear Sky Airlines rep drawing an air map with her fingers. When she’s finished, Jessica takes a whole-body breath, one visible from seventy-five yards away, and sets out in their direction.

  “Duck!” Marcus whisper-yells.

  Natty instinctively dips behind Marcus and feels like a sycophantic jackass for doing so. Yet in deference to his friend, Natty waits until Jessica passes before commencing with the brotherly emasculation. “Have you lost your balls?”

  “Calm down, Tater Tot,” Marcus commands sotto voce.

  Natty will not calm down. He is outraged by this turn of events. “What are you? Twenty-six going on twelve? Wanna write her a note asking her to check the box if she still likes you? I’ll pass it to her during recess!” Natty is just getting started. “This is not acceptable. Not at all. Not from the same guy who rode his anthropology professor so hard she lost tenure.”

  Marcus ignores this last comment especially, then waits until Jessica turns a corner before addressing his friend. “I liked you better before you got rid of your accent.” Natty’s parents had paid a vocal instructor two hundred dollars an hour to “deregionalize” their son’s speech so he’d be taken more seriously in the realm of international business. “When you were all ‘aw shucks’ and scared of me.”

  “Ah hah-vaynt lahst mah raid-nake ak-say-ent,” says Natty in a deep-fried squirrelly drawl. “Ah jus choos naht t’ yooose eee-it.” He double-time scurries to keep up with Marcus, whose stride is twice the length of his own. “And I was never scared of you,” continues Natty, returning to his foreign tongue, the neutral dialect known as Standard American with a strong hint of college-male braggadocio and puerility. “I was scared of the smell. Of. … your… balls.”

  “Now who’s the one acting twelve, Junior High?” Marcus asks, pausing to look around the bend before turning the same corner. He catches sight of Jessica’s back just before she enters the glass doors of the Clear Sky customer service center. He can relax now, seeing that there are at least twenty people on line in front of her. She’ll be there for a while.

  Natty steps right in front of him, but it’s a symbolic gesture of protest at best. With a twelve-inch height advantage over his friend, Marcus’s view of Jessica is still unobstructed. This is not lost on Natty, a tenacious flea who leap
s into the air to block the sight line between him and her. Marcus sidesteps left, Natty bounces right. Marcus sidesteps right, Natty bounces left.

  “That’s right, Professor,” Natty taunts. “I can do this shiz all damn day.” To onlookers, it looks like an outmatched game of one-on-one, only without a ball or a hoop. Had Marcus not so carefully hidden himself around the corner and out of her view, Natty’s gamesmanship surely would have attracted Jessica’s attention, too.

  Marcus gives up. Stops. “Are you really a Rhodes Scholar?”

  “Never forget,” Natty says, puffing up his birdcage chest, “that the primary export of Nathaniel Addison is awesome.”

  “I pity the British,” Marcus says before returning his attention to the Clear Sky Airlines customer service center. Jessica is no longer the last person on line—there’s a woman behind her—but no one has moved forward.

  “I’m trying to help you here,” Natty says. “I was there when this girl fucked you up. I was there when you only got out of bed for class. I was the one who was nearly suffocated by the stank of your unwashed balls—”

  “You take far too much pleasure in talking about my balls,” Marcus counters.

  A bald (him) blue-haired (her) couple in their Boca Raton best has just hobbled up to the departures board. They harrumph over the use of such coarse language.

  “I can’t help it,” Natty says to them with a mischievous grin. “I just love every inch of this man, especially his balls.”

  The geriatrics scurry away as quickly as they possibly can, outraged at the crudity of youth.

  “Testicles!” Natty shouts after them. “If you prefer the proper terminology!”

  “Are you done talking about my balls, Brokeback?” Marcus asks.

  Natty frowns, a gesture that takes a lot of effort from his freckled, preternaturally sunshiny face. “I wasn’t kidding, dude. I’ve got a whole heart full of nonsexual man love for you,” he says. “Which is why I am asking you to leave this airport with me right now. Take the train back to Princeton. We’ll head to Ivy Inn, toast a few rounds to our final semester, chat up some new lady friends, and forget that you ever saw the bitch—”

  Marcus lunges. “Don’t ever call her that!” Natty is pinned against the wall by the menace in Marcus’s voice, the fury in his stare. Both men are staggered by Marcus’s feral instinct to protect and defend the only woman who doesn’t want his protection or defense.

  “S-s-orry,” Natty stammers, still taken aback by this never-before-seen burst of violence from Marcus, a bona fide pacifist with whom he has never, not once, had a serious argument.

  Marcus relaxes his stance, closes his eyes, shakes his head ruefully “My response had more to do with what’s fucked up about me than anything that’s fucked up about her.”

  Natty parses that bit of inarticulation, amazed by his friend’s swift degeneration at the mere mention of her. “It’s just, well, I was there. I saw how long it took you to recover.”

  “That’s just it, Natty” Marcus opens his eyes. “I’m not sure I ever did.”

  Natty holds up his palms in surrender because there is no suitable response to this confession. Whether innate or the result of so many hours practicing meditation, Marcus’s single-mindedness is unrivaled and legendary, even on a campus with more than its share of freakish overachieving geniuses. When Marcus turns his annihilative attention to something—or someone—there is nothing else. He will not shift his focus until he has won the impossible bet, been awarded the impossible fellowship, bedded the impossible woman. Natty has no idea what Marcus ultimately seeks from Jessica Darling. He knows only that he doesn’t want to stick around long enough to see his infallible friend be defeated by her again.

  “Dude,” Natty says, shouldering his bag and turning toward the signs pointing in the direction of the Air Train exit. “You need a roundhouse kick to the brain.”

  “You wish you could kick that high, Booster Seat.”

  Natty is marginally cheered by Marcus’s put-down. “Oh, fuck you, Professor.”

  They stand face-to-face for a moment before Natty silently extends his fist. Marcus grabs him by the hand and pulls Natty to his chest for a backslapping bro hug.

  “Yeah,” Marcus replies. “I love you, too.”

  ten

  Jessica is thinking about the wedding. Bridget and Percy liked how the numbers looked: 01/20/2010. All those zeroes, ones, and twos, nearly palindromic, only with a 20/20 in the center, “like perfect vision,” Percy said. Choosing to get married on this strange date—a Wednesday?, double-checked by all the invited guests after consulting their calendars—wasn’t just a fit of numerical whimsy. The date was a significant part of their romantic history.

  “It’s the eighth anniversary of our first kiss,” Percy explained when Jessica inquired about the date.

  “His girlie knack for remembering such details,” replied Bridget in a playful tone, “is why I finally gave in and agreed to this whole wedding thing.”

  Jessica tries to remember the particulars of that conversation. Had she gone uptown to visit Bridget and Percy’s West Harlem loft? Or had they made it out to her place in Brooklyn? Had they met somewhere in the middle, Hell’s Kitchen, maybe, for beers and burritos? She’s unable to piece together the details; she can remember only the words. All her memories are fuzzed over today, symptomatic of the disembodied disassociation of frequent air travel, but also the murky consequences of her mind’s slog through logical and illogical, fact versus fiction, what just happened, what’s happening now, and what could possibly happen next.

  Jessica works harder at pinning down this memory of Bridget and Percy’s engagement as she stands on line at the Clear Sky customer ser vice center. This is not a happy place. If you’re there, you’re supposed to be in the air, but for some reason—be it a chaotic weather pattern, a missed connection, or some security line clusterfuckery involving a cactus plant derivative—you are not. The CSCSC is about as utilitarian and unadorned as a space can be. It has no inspirational artwork or vases of silk flowers on display, no smooth jazz or soothing aromatherapeutic scents piped in through the walls. Jessica appreciates and even respects that the CSCSC does not attempt to convince its customers that it is anything other than what it is: an unhappy place.

  Thinking about Bridget and Percy as she stands on line is preferable to obsessing over the strange particulars of the line itself. Specifically, that she appears to be only one of two people who were not on the flight to Las Vegas canceled due to “unforeseeable mechanical complications,” and that the majority of these distressed passengers desperate to get the next flight out to Las Vegas are traveling together as a group consisting of the most devoted members of a fan club for a performer Jessica cannot think about if she’s going to make it through the day.

  “Holding!” brays the woman behind Jessica to no one in particular and everyone in general. Never has a person so meticulously (“Holding …”) chronicled (“On hold …”) the (“Still on hold …”) drama (“Still holding …”) of (“Can ya believe I’m still on hold?”) being (“I can’t believe I’m still on hold …”) on (“Finally! A live person! What? You have to put me back on hold?”) hold. Jessica finally gives in to her curiosity and turns around to find a woman a few inches shorter than she is, but much wider, with a formidable bosom. Definitely middle-aged, if not chronologically, then sartorially, in her wrinkle-resistant zebra-trimmed-in-giraffe-print travel separates. But at least this woman in her grown-up Garanimals isn’t a member of the fan club. Her existence is Jessica’s only link to reality in an otherwise surreal situation, another witness that all this is, in fact, actually happening.

  That is, unless Jessica is making her up, too.

  “I’m holding,” Garanimals explains, gesturing with her cell phone.

  “I had no idea,” Jessica deadpans before facing forward again.

  Garanimals pokes her in the shoulder blade. “You got a better shot of solving your problem on the phone.”
/>   “Really?”

  “The phone number’s on your boarding pass.” Garanimals holds up a finger, listens for a moment. “Ooh! I think I’ve got somebody,” she says before frowning. “Nope. Still holding.” A sigh. “I have a friend who works for the airline. She says the phone is the faster, better way to go. Though she’s not such a good friend that she can get me the hell out of coach. The only Coach that makes me happy is a five-hundred-dollar purse, ya know what I’m saying?”

  Jessica smiles weakly. “Then why do you bother with the line?”

  Garanimals tips her head back and cackles, revealing silver fillings in her back molars. “I’m not taking any chances. ’Cause the one time I missed my connection and I didn’t get on this line, I was told that I could only solve my customer service problem if I got on this line. Catch-22, ya know what I’m saying?”

  “Oh,” Jessica replies, unzipping the bag that holds her phone.

  The fan club president and VP (designated as such by their personalized baseball caps) are arguing with the Clear Sky customer service representatives at the desk. “This is not our problem! This is your problem! And it’s gonna be an ever-bigger problem for you if you can’t get all twenty of us there before the curtain goes up tonight!”

  Meanwhile, the eighteen members without titles have cell phones pressed to their ears, hoping to talk to someone, anyone, who can get them on the next flight to Vegas. Few speak; most commiserate with huffs and upthrown hands as they endure the interminable hold that has been put on them by the Clear Sky automated customer service system. They are stuck in both virtual and real-life standstills.

  Jessica fumbles around inside her bag, thinking, as she always does when she’s looking for something inside this bag—usually her cell phone, a stick of gum, or a pen—that there are too many pockets within pockets. Multiple options has always been a problem for Jessica, in luggage and in life. She imagines that this pockets-within-pockets design is meant to make things more convenient for the traveler, as it’s possible to designate a specific pocket for each and every item one could possibly need on the go. But Jessica has never had the inclination to devise such an organizational system, though it would hardly take that much time to assign the slanty side pocket on the left FOR GUM ONLY, or those skinny tubular pockets FOR PENS ONLY, especially in the case of the latter, when it’s obvious that those pockets are indeed meant FOR PENS ONLY because nothing else would fit inside them. But no, she’s never bothered to put anything in a specific place, choosing instead to stuff items in the bag at random, which always results in moments like this, when she is pulling out an unusable tampon half emancipated from its protective paper wrapper, a bottle of generic medicinal-smelling hand sanitizer, a fossilized trick-or-treat-size Baby Ruth bar … everything but the cell phone she’s looking for. She usually curses the pockets, but today she’s grateful for them, if only because contemplating the pockets helped waste brain time that might have been devoted to other subjects.